Church Website Blocked As 'Porn' by Turkish Parliament; Lawmaker Calls it ‘Embarrassing, Humiliating and Defaming’

Aykan Erdemir, a member of Turkey's Parliament, planned to travel to Diyarbakir Church in mid-June. In preparation for his visit, he looked for information about the church on their website. He did not get far. His office computer in the parliament building blocked the church website with a message that it contained "pornographic" content.

Checking the websites of other Turkish Protestant churches, Erdemir and his colleagues found them all blocked, though the filtering screens did not mention "pornography" as the reason.

Although websites are occasionally banned in Turkey - the most notable in recent months being YouTube - the website for Diyarbakir Church, in southeastern Turkey, is not under a national ban.

The block only affected computers in the parliament, and it was quickly removed after Erdemir complained.

"The lifting of the block on the Diyarbakir Church website was a small step for internet freedoms in Turkey, but a big step for internet freedom in the Parliament," he said. Erdemir, who represents the western province of Bursa in the main opposition Republican People's Party, said the episode is a symptom of deep-rooted governmental antagonism toward Christians, especially Protestants, and of Turkey's increasing intolerance towards minorities.

He described the block on the website as, "humiliating, embarrassing and defaming." The newspaper Daily Hurriyet reported Thursday that the filter killed two birds with one stone-it simultaneously worked to prejudice Parliamentarians and to attack minority groups.

"They are just trying to support their own party's politics and agendas with inflammatory and marginalizing language," said Ahmet Guvener, pastor of the Diyarbakir Church. "This is embarrassing and outrageous and they should apologize for this." Guvener, a convert from Islam, said he does not feel he has equal rights with other Turks, and that his country regards him as a threat. His phone, he said, has been tapped since 2007, when three Christians were tortured and murdered in the city of Malatya.

"They have been listening to my phone without a break since Malatya," Guvener said. He claims to have seen his name on wiretap lists, and that police continue to question him about subjects he has discussed on the phone with other Christian believers.

He believes that law enforcement authorities consider Christianity to be one of the country's greatest threats, and that military training has reinforced an attitude of marginalization. "They really don't see Turkish Christians as citizens of this country," he said. "Turkey knowingly intimidates Christians here, so in my opinion, the block on our website was done knowingly."
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Big-city Turkey elects 25-year-old Christian woman as mayor

A 25-year-old student has burst onto the political scene in Turkey as the first Christian woman to govern a metropolitan city in this predominantly Muslim republic.

Put forward as a candidate by the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Turkey’s main Kurdish party, in municipal elections on March 30, Februniye Akyol was elected co-mayor of the southeastern city of Mardin together with Ahmet Turk, 71, a widely respected veteran Kurdish leader. The BDP splits all top posts between a man and a woman to boost female participation in politics.

“The Kurdish party has enabled me to fight for my people and its rights, and this is what I am going to do,” Akyol told Al-Monitor in an interview in Mardin this week. “I’m not here as an ornament.”

Akyol, the daughter of a silversmith, is a member of the Syriac community, an ancient branch of the Christian faith whose followers still speak a version of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. The region of Tur Abdin near Mardin, a plateau dotted with monasteries that go back to the fourth century, is the Syriacs’ historical heartland.

Turkey has had Christian mayors of smaller towns before, and in 2011 the Syriac politician Erol Dora, also running on a BDP ticket, became the first Christian member of parliament in Ankara since the 1960s. But Akyol is the first Christian to govern one of Turkey’s 30 metropolitan municipalities.

The Syriac community, which numbered around 200,000 people in Tur Abdin a century ago, was decimated by the massacres of Anatolian Christians during World War I, when Syriacs shared the fate of the Armenians. In the decades that followed, many survivors and their descendants fled poverty, persecution and the war between the Turkish state and Kurdish rebels in the region to settle in Europe. Today, a total of 150,000 Syriacs live in Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Some 15,000 are in Istanbul, but less than 5,000 remain in Tur Abdin.

Although Turkey began issuing appeals for Syriacs to return to their homeland in the early 2000s and strengthened social and religious rights under the country’s EU membership application, Akyol said her community did not yet enjoy full democratic privileges. “Syriacs here are still not free, they can’t live in peace,” Akyol said.

The newly elected mayor’s own name is a case in point. Born and christened Fabronia Benno, she had to run for office under her official Turkish name, Februniye Akyol, because of long-standing restrictions on the cultures and languages of ethnic and religious minorities in Turkey. Since the Syriacs are not officially recognized as a religious minority by the Turkish state, they are not allowed their own schools to teach their ancient language to their children. Many Syriac villages were destroyed in the war between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a rebel group fighting for Kurdish self-rule since 1984.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/christian-mayor-turkey-rights-bdp-mardin.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=23327&utm_campaign=0##ixzz2yvrXpL7e

Turkey torture, murder suspects under house arrest

Turkey`s Ministry of Justice has ordered five murder suspects in the 2007 torture and murder of five employees of a publishing house to be electronically tagged and held under house arrest.

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Five suspects of Zirve massacre released, Christians anxious

As per a recently passed law that decreased the maximum period of detention to five years, five suspects tried for brutally killing three Christians at the Zirve Publishing House were released pending trial on Friday, a move that has made Christians in Turkey concerned for their safety.

The Association of Protestant Churches of Turkey expressed its concern over the court's decision in a written statement on Saturday. Noting that families of the victims and NGO activists were threatened by the suspects throughout the duration of the case's hearings, the statement read: “As things stand, those who have been threatened are starting to feel rather uneasy. The releases have deeply saddened Christians [in Turkey] and led to them losing faith in [the] justice [system].”

Noting that the suspects of the murder will now be able to move freely in society, the statement continued: “Who will carry the moral responsibility for this shocking decision? … As Christian citizens, our own lives as well as those of our families' are in great danger, and we are following the developments in dismay.”

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Malatya murder suspects to be set free

Five Turkish murder suspects on trial for torturing and killing three Christians in Malatya nearly seven years ago are expected to be set free on bail within the next few days, before the conclusion of their trial in southeast Turkey.

Under a new judicial package passed by the Turkish Parliament on Feb. 21, the detention limit for suspects on trial who have not yet been convicted was reduced from 10 to five years. Once the proposed laws are approved by the Turkish President and published in the Official Gazette— expected at the latest by March 7— the five Malatya suspects would be eligible for immediate release.

Susanne Geske, widow of the German victim Tilmann Geske, admitted that “the thought of meeting one of these men downtown, or at the mall” until the trial is concluded was something she and her children still living in Malatya would “have to get used to”.

Because the suspects face a life sentence for deadly assault, the likelihood that they will flee the country “is very high”, Umut Sahin announced in a written statement from the Association of Protestant Churches in Turkey. Although Sahin told World Watch Monitor that the lawyers representing the victims’ families have requested that the five suspects be fitted with electronic tracking devices when released, he said any formal conditions of their bail would be decided by the court.

“But even that is unclear, as to what court that will be,” Sahin admitted, since the same legal package has also abolished the Special Authorized Courts under which the Malatya suspects were being tried.

During the past four years, some 20,000 military personnel, members of the Kurdish party, journalists and a variety of activists were convicted in these special anti-terrorism courts of planning alleged coup attempts against the ruling Justice and Development Party government.

Once the special courts are dissolved, the Malatya case will be moved into the normal criminal court system, with the likelihood that the current judges and prosecutors would be changed. Practically speaking, that would require the new officials assigned to the case to go through more than 100,000 pages of documents submitted during the trial’s 92 hearings to date.

“So the whole process could last some more years,” said Geske, who told World Watch Monitor that she hoped the case would be left with the current judicial officials and finished soon.

“It’s the law now,” she said, “so we can’t really do anything about it,” referring to both the changed court status and the pending release of the murder suspects. “We’re fine, and my kids are doing well. Some in our church here are really upset. But God can do miracles, so we are praying that the judges and prosecutor will not be changed. And we will keep on loving our enemies.”

During the last Malatya court hearing on Feb. 24, defense lawyers tried for two hours to block the reading of the prosecutor’s final appeal for sentencing of the accused killers and perpetrators, demanding that this be postponed until the new law went into effect.

But Presiding Judge Hayrettin Kisa, who has declared his firm intention to conclude the case by June, denied the defense’s request.

State Prosecutor Zafer Hazar then read out his closing statement, demanding three consecutive life sentences against the five accused killers, as well as life sentences against nine of the accused perpetrators.

In addition, the state requested that one suspect who had turned state's evidence be judged according to the Active Repentance Law, and that two accused accomplices who were never detained be acquitted.

The prosecution summation cited evidence that the Malatya murders were clearly linked to the previous assassinations of two other Christians in Turkey: Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on January 2007 in front of his Agos newspaper office in Istanbul, and Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro while kneeling at the altar of his Trabzon church on February 2006. Links were cited to the JITEM and TUSHAD units, allegedly formed illegally within various Turkish military forces to create disinformation and eliminate enemies of the state.

When the Malatya case is set to reconvene on April 10, the defense will be allowed a final statement. A subsequent hearing is expected to be scheduled for the verdicts to be announced.

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Forced Islamisation of Armenians raises questions about today's Turkey

Turks are getting ready for a hot election in March when they will cast their ballot to elect a new parliament and, for the first time, a new president. Almost certainly, Sunni ethics will certainly inform the debate. Not much coverage has gone to a conference held in early November on the forced islamisation of Armenians before and after the 1915 genocide.

Organised by Istanbul's Boğaziçi University and the Hrant Dink Foundation, which is named after Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos. He was assassinated in 2007 by Turkish nationalists with the tolerance of elements within the Turkish state.

Although some 600 people from around the world attended the conference, the Turkish media failed to give the event the attention it deserved.

In their presentations, various speakers noted that forced Islamisation was not visited only on individual children and women survivors but on entire families forced to convert in order to survive in the new Turkey born out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

The founding of the new Turkish Republic was premised on the policies of Islamisation and genocide pursued by the Young Turks and the Committee of Union and Progress. This occurred after Armenian members of the Young Turks and the Committee split from ethnic Turks in 1913.

Based on various reports, the goal of the Committee of Union and Progress in 1915 was to reduce the Armenian population (5 to 10 per cent of the empire's population) where it had its strongest and oldest roots - the central, southern and eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire - since its aim was to establish a new Turkey that would be Sunni Muslim. Even Kemal Ataturk, founder of Turkey's so-called secular republic, appealed to Muslim solidarity to consolidate his power. In short, a real Turk was a Muslim Turk.

Not surprisingly, after the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians known as Karamanlis were uprooted from Anatolia and sent to Greece.

Turkish historian Taner Akçam, who teaches at Clark University in the United States, is one of the foremost specialist on the Armenian Genocide. In his address, he spoke of 200,000 Islamised Armenians, noting that the assets of the genocide victims went to the Turks.

Overall, historians focused on a very important issue. Because of forced islamisation, millions of Turks have ties to the Armenian and/or Christian communities. Some call them 'crypto-Armenians' or 'crypto-Christians;.

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Tulsa physician with roots in Turkey sells Christian movies

Tulsa physician Enis Sakirgil opened a store last month in south Tulsa that sells Christian and family movies on Blu-ray and DVD. 

"Jesus was always talking in parables that would bring images into people's minds. Movies are the parables of today," he said. 

His store and the online video sales business that supports it are the most recent expressions of a family faith that extends back for centuries. 

Sakirgil was born and raised in Antioch, Turkey, one of the centers of the early church, and a city where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. 

He comes from an Eastern Orthodox family in a land where Christianity once flourished but which now is 99 percent Muslim. 

Sakirgil said he became a born-again Christian when he was a medical student attending a church founded by American missionaries in Istanbul. 

He was attracted to the church because the services were in Turkish, his native tongue, and not in Arabic, like the church in which he was raised. 

He became a worship leader in the church and founded the first-ever Christian rock band in Turkey, he said. 

During his medical residency in Turkey, he heard about In His Image, a Christian family-practice residency program in Tulsa. He could not get the idea of attending the residency program out of his mind, he said.
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Fish Flix

Turkey drops a screen over Christianity

TRABZON, TURKEY

Many of Turkey’s historic monuments have followed the same path through the centuries: Byzantine church to Ottoman mosque to secular museum. This July, the 13th-century Hagia Sophia church in the eastern city of Trabzon added a new phase: return to mosque.

While the conversion of this Hagia Sophia – not the more famous structure by the same name in Istanbul – to a house of Muslim worship reflects the increasingly religious approach of Turkey's government, the impact on the tourism industry has been buffered by an uptick in foreign visitors from the Middle East, who are largely disinterested in the traditional tourist landmarks.  

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Hüseyin Buyuk, a local working for the Historic Hagia Sophia Association, ushered visitors through the divided entrance. Local Muslim worshipers went to the right, removing their shoes before stepping onto the red carpet inside, where large white screens shield Christian icons from their eyes, while non-Muslim tourists went to the left, following an uncarpeted passageway behind the screens to gaze upon bright frescoes depicting Christ. 

From 1964 until December 2012, Trabzon’s Hagia Sophia functioned as a museum. But after a court ruling that, in the legacy of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, the building was rightfully a mosque, the Turkish Ministry of Culture was evicted. On July 5, the late-Byzantine church reopened as a mosque in time for the first Friday prayer of Ramadan.

“It has always been a house of worship,” Mr. Buyuk says, supporting the court ruling. “We already have a cultural museum.” 

The Hagia Sophia was the second such museum to be converted recently – Iznik’s Hagia Sophia was reopened as a mosque in July 2012 – and it may not be the last. The conservative opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) introduced a bill Nov. 8 to resume Muslim prayer in Istanbul’s famed 4th-century basilica, Hagia Sophia, first converted to a museum in 1935.

Dr. Şükrü Yarcan, a tourism specialist at Nisantasi University, says the restoration of Muslim prayer in historical sites like Trabzon’s Hagia Sophia is unlikely to stop non-Muslim tourists from visiting them, but it contributes to foreign impressions that the country is growing more religious, particularly in more distant regions like North America and East Asia. 

“They might think that Turkey is going to be an Islamic country and they might refrain from coming,” said Yarcan. “They might have an image of Turkey as a negative one.”

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Turkish pastor arrested on human trafficking accusations

A Turkish Protestant pastor arrested by police in the Black Sea province of Samsun this week is accused of involvement in prostitution and the human trafficking of refugees.

Pastor Orhan Picaklar of the Samsun Agape Church was summoned to local police headquarters for questioning on Monday afternoon (November 11).

The 42-year-old pastor was detained until Wednesday evening in a police investigation led by the Morals Bureau of the Public Order Division. The criminal case was reportedly based on a telephoned complaint from an unidentified person.

“It is obviously a deliberate plot,” a spokesperson from the Alliance of Protestant Churches in Turkey told World Watch Monitor, saying that Picaklar had been harassed for years by local media and city authorities who openly opposed the church’s existence.

While in detention with seven other individuals, Picaklar learned they were all being named as suspects in the same “human trafficking operation”.

“I hadn’t ever seen any of them, and none of them knew me either!” Picaklar told World Watch Monitor.

But the Turkish press was quick to trumpet the pastor’s arrest for the next two days, before Picaklar was finally brought to testify before the prosecutor on Wednesday afternoon.

A former Muslim who converted to Christianity 21 years ago, Picaklar has pastored the Samsun Agape Church since 2003. The congregation was granted formal “association” status in 2005, although like other new Christian congregations in Turkey, it is still prohibited by law from official government recognition as a church.

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Why Are 700 Greeks Praying In a Turkish Hotel?

There is a small town on Turkey’s western Aegean coast, called Ayvalik. On Sept. 29, a striking photo from this town hit the newspapers. A local hotel was hosting a religious service, attended by 700 clerics who came from various Greek islands.

Those familiar with the historic tensions between Turkey and Greece could assume that the clerics prayed in Ayvalik in a show of defiance. The actual story, however, is quite different, offering a good perspective of how much religious freedom non-Muslims enjoy in Turkey.

The clerics had in fact come to Ayvalik to hold a religious service at the local Taxiarchis Orthodox Church. But as they failed to obtain the “required” permission from the authorities, they had to make a last-minute arrangement and pray at a hotel.

Let’s see how things unfolded, as reported in the Taraf daily: “When the governor’s office denied them permission for a service at the Taxiarchis Church in Ayvalik, the 700 Greeks decided to book the conference hall of a hotel. The service, held in the conference hall of the Halic Park Hotel in Ayvalik, was attended by a total of 700 people, including 400 from the island of Lesbos and 300 from Athens, Crete and elsewhere. The Greek consul in Izmir, Theodore Tsakiris, a parliament member from Lesbos and the Orhomenos mayor also attended the service. A member of the Greek Orthodox community in Turkey, who requested anonymity, told Taraf : ‘Back in April, we applied to hold a service at the Taxiarchis Church on Sept. 29. We waited six months for a reply. The rejection came only three days before the scheduled service date. Why did they wait for six months? We believe they did so deliberately. Concerts are being organized in the church where we want to pray. It is hard to understand why our religious service becomes a problem while concerts are allowed to be held in the church.”

The Taraf story contains also the following information: “The Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul applied to the governor’s office in April for a permission for a religious service on Sept. 29 at the Taxiarchis Church, which has a ‘museum’ status. The governor’s office, in turn, sought an approval from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The ministry rejected the request on the grounds that ‘the Taxiarchis Church does not figure in the 2000 catalogue of churches where religious services could be held.’”

You may already be confused. Why has a church become a museum? Why does worshipping in a church require the permission of administrative authorities? Why do Greek clerics hold prayers in Turkey?

Let’s start with the last question. The Greek Orthodox patriarchate in Istanbul is an ecumenical patriarchate, according to the title it uses. The title signifies a declaration that the ecumenical patriarch is the spiritual leader of all Orthodox Christians in the world, just as the pope is for Catholics. Even though some Orthodox churches do not recognize the patriarch’s authority, many others around the world accept the patriarchate in Istanbul as their universal spiritual leadership.

Turkey, however, refuses to recognize the patriarchate’s ecumenical title. Officially, the patriarchate is considered to be the religious institution of the Greek community in Istanbul, which has today dwindled to 3,000 people.

Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power, restrictions on the patriarchate have been eased to a certain degree, but measures that would meet the genuine needs of the institution have never materialized. A decision to reopen the Halki Theological School was removed at the last minute from the democratization package that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan unveiled on Monday, Sept. 30. The seminary is vital for raising future patriarchs.

This brief explanation should have made it clear why 700 Orthodox Greeks would come to Turkey for a religious service. They did so on the call of their spiritual leader to pray in a church which is historically theirs.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/10/turkey-greek-orthodox-patriarchate-restrictions-churches.html#ixzz2ggXhdGhs

Could Turkey’s Christians Wear Police Uniforms?

 Even though no such rule exists on the books, it so happens that not even one single non-Muslim army officer, policeman or judge exists in Turkey. Non-Muslims are absent not only from the security and judiciary establishment but from the public sector altogether. Why? Is it because of their small numbers?

Turkey’s non-Muslim population today is estimated at about 100,000. According to figures by the London-based Minority Rights Group International, it includes 23,000 Jews, 3,000 Greeks, 60,000 Armenians and 15,000 Syriacs. In addition, there are Turkish converts to Protestant Christianity, estimated to number between 3,000 and 5,000.

Could it be a coincidence that none of those 100,000-plus people are public servants? In an Aug. 8 article for Al-Monitor, I wrote about how non-Muslims are marked with secret codes in the birth registers. This practice became public knowledge by mere chance earlier this year when a woman, who applied to enroll her child in an Armenian school, received a reply from the Education Ministry which revealed that birth registration offices have been using ancestry codes to secretly mark citizens of Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Syriac origin.

In any other country, such revelation would have sparked a huge outcry and long occupied the public agenda, but in Turkey it merited only short-lived media coverage before being forgotten. The coding practice, in fact, provides an indirect explanation of why non-Muslims fail to become public servants in Turkey, since birth registration offices appear to keep records of ethnic and religious origins even after people change names or convert, almost like a permanent “criminal record.” The practice suggests that whenever a non-Muslim applies to become a police or army officer, the “secret” information in birth registries instantly flows to the related institutions.

The veto that non-Muslims face in the public sector came under the spotlight again this week through an intriguing incident. The spiritual leader of Turkey’s Syriacs, acting Patriarch Yusuf Cetin, gave an interview to the Milliyet daily, in which he questioned why “people of other faiths are not assigned posts in public administration, the military and the police.”

The directorate-general of police responded in a message on its official Twitter feed: “Mr. Yusuf Cetin, the Istanbul Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church, has made remarks asking why Syriac citizens are absent from the police department. All citizens of the Turkish Republic, regardless of religion, race and sect, are able to become police officers. We invite our Syriac citizens, too, to enter the exams of the police department and become police officers.”

The Hurriyet Daily News reported that representatives of Turkey’s non-Muslim communities greeted the message with skepticism. They stressed that the problem cannot be resolved with just an appeal and that the discrimination non-Muslims face in the public sector under unwritten rules cannot be eradicated overnight.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/10/turkey-urges-christians-join-police.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=23327&utm_campaign=0#ixzz2i0a5pYNH

Monastery Land Returned

Turkish authorities decided the return of the lands of the historic Mor Gabriel Monastery to the Syriac community in Turkey, as local media report. The Assembly of Foundations, the decision-making body of the Directorate General of Foundations, approved to return land to the Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation on Monday.

The Director General of the Directorate General of Foundations, Adnan Erdem, said the assembly unanimously approved the decision to return the land adding that this decision means the biggest land return during the republican history of Turkey. Mor Gabriel is a 1,700-year-old historic monastery located in the southeastern province of Mardin's Midyat district. In 2008, the Forestry Ministry, the Land Registry Cadaster Office and the villages of Yayvantepe, Candarli and Eglence sued the monastery for allegedly occupying their fields.

The lawsuit was finalized last year, recognizing the monastery as an "occupier." The case was then brought to the European Court of Human Rights. "The land of the Mor Gabriel Monastery will return to the monastery's foundation," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised last week, while declaring a wide range of reforms on democracy.

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Church bells ringing again

For almost a century, the bells of St. Giragos, a magnificent 14th-century church built of sturdy black basalt bricks, were silent.

Severely damaged during the 1915 massacre and deportation of local Christians, it stood roofless and abandoned for decades, a poignant reminder of the void left by the killing of its congregants.

Yet for several months now the tolling of bells can once again be heard emanating from the belfry and echoing through the city’s narrow alleyways and busy markets.

St. Giragos recently underwent an extensive $3 million dollar restoration that included a new roof, the reconstruction of all seven of its original altars—a unique feature for a church, which usually has just one—and the return of an iron bell to its belfry.

“Right now the bells are just symbolic,” said Arahim Demirciyen, an ethnic Armenian who rings the bells twice a day. “A priest is currently in training in the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem. When he finishes and arrives here we can also start holding regular weekly services.”

The reopening of what church officials say is the largest Armenian place of worship in southeastern Turkey is part of a re-evaluation by Kurdish Muslims of the active role their ancestors played in the killings of minorities including Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and Jews in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire.

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Promised legal reforms disappoint Turkey’s religious minorities

The Turkish government’s long-awaited “democratisation package” of reform laws announced this week has met with considerable disappointment among Turkey’s minority religious communities.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed on Monday (September 30) a broad array of reform laws, drafted by his ruling Justice and Development Party for parliamentary debate and approval.

Although public focus remained on legal changes in the Kurdish resolution process, electoral reform and lifting the headscarf ban in public offices, there were some positive, if symbolic, steps affecting the nation’s non-Muslim communities.

But without question, the religious minorities were expecting more tangible changes to correct their status as second-class citizens: most prominently, the re-opening of the Orthodox Church’s Halki Seminary, along with recognition of the Alevis as a distinct faith community.

“There are positive aspects, but also there are important steps missing,” Laki Vingas told Today’s Zaman after Erdogan’s speech. A member of the Greek Orthodox community, Vingas represents non-Muslim foundations on the council of the Directorate General of Foundations under the prime minister’s office.

“The package in its entirety is positive, but there is nothing about Alevis,” Radikal columnist Yetvart Danziyan noted.

The Alevi community, estimated at 20 per cent of the Turkish population, is denied official recognition as a distinct faith community from the Sunni Muslim majority. As a result, Alevi cemevis (places of worship) are refused the state upkeep and tax exemptions granted to all Sunni mosques, Alevi dedes (religious leaders) are ineligible for the state salaries paid to Sunni imams, and basic Alevi beliefs are excluded from the required religion courses in all public schools.

Danziyan also observed, “The failure to open the [Halki] theological school has caused disappointment not only among the Greek community, but all minority groups.”
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Transformation of Hagia Sofia into a mosque challenges the entire Christian world

The famous Hagia Sofia Church in Istanbul may become a mosque again. An official request has already been submitted to the authorities. If it’s satisfied, the Christian world will lose one of its important symbols and a new wave of islamization along with the persecution of Christians will start in Turkey, according to experts.

Built in the middle of the 4th century, Hagia Sofia or Santa Sofia was an active mosque once. It was after the Fall of Constantinople in the 15th century. Only in 1935, thanks to the policy of religious and ethnic tolerance carried out by a founder and the Republic of Turkey’s first President, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, one of the largest Christian churches in the world was transformed into a museum. It was included as a World Heritage Site on the UNESCO list in the late 1980s.

Calls for permission to hold prayers in the church have been repeatedly voiced over the last few years. However, they were ignored. Now Turkish politicians use is it in their political games trying to create public opinion, Stanislav Tarasov, the head of the Middle East-Caucasus Centre of the International Institute of the Newest States, believes:

“There are certain political circles which call for the transformation of the Christian church into a mosque, challenging the entire Christian world this way. They want to reduce global events happening in the Middle East to a conflict of civilizations.”

The Istanbul Hagia Sofia is not the first among Turkey’s Christian churches which became a target for some politicians who deliberately try to make a religious center out of it. In spite of repeated calls of Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople to return relics to the Christian world, churches in Nicaea and Trebizond (present day Iznik and Trabzon) were transformed into mosques. They were museums, just like Hagia Sofia, only a while ago. Soon Salat will be held in the oldest monument of Byzantine architecture – the Monastery of Stoudios. It’s a very disturbing tendency,” Tarasov believes.

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